Since rocketing to fame as a steely Amazonian superhero in 2017’s Wonder Woman, the 41-year-old Israeli actor has been unable to wrap that golden lasso of hers around a decent film role for love nor money. There were the despairing Wonder Woman followups – the cacophonously emo Justice League and gaudy scorn-magnet Wonder Woman 1984. There was the dopey Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (Whodunnit?
The turgid espionage thriller Red Notice, which sandwiched Gadot between The Rock and Ryan Reynolds, all fizzing with the sort of wonderful tri-directional chemistry you’d normally only get to see by asking Grok to generate its own remake of The Philadelphia Story. That was 2021, and who’d have thought there was still some bottom left to this barrel? Last year brought Snow White, with Gadot slumping to new lows as an inhumanly creaky singing witch.
Now, she’s hoofing it around London in The Runner, a trashy, garishly colourful piece of nonsense about a jogger blackmailed into committing a murder to save her son. Directed by Kevin Macdonald, the once-credible Scottish filmmaker behind The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, The Runner arrived on Prime Video last week. It already seems to have come and gone: as I’m writing this, it sits at 5th in the streamer’s charts.
Reviews were universally damning, and gleeful in their ridicule. Gadot is on characteristically brittle form as she jogs around London, smashing into pedestrians and cars and talking frantically into her earpiece. It’s not quite her worst performance.
Shockingly, it’s not even the worst performance in the movie, being somehow outdone by Damian Lewis in preposterous puppetmaster mode. But it’s yet more ammunition for her myriad detractors. The Runner’s largest viewing demographic may in fact be those social media users who’ve had three-second clips of Gadot’s clunky line deliveries shared mockingly on their feeds.
It’s hard to see a way back for Gadot at this point. She has become not just a bad actor, but an actor who is famously bad at acting. There is always a need for such a figure to exist in the world, to serve as a sort of universal shorthand punchline, and in 2026, it’s clear that Gal Gadot is it.
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